The idea of philosophy as a kind of therapy, though by no means standard, has been present in metaphilosophical reflection since antiquity. Diverse versions of it were also discussed and applied by more recent authors such as Wittgenstein, Hadot and Foucault. In order to develop an explicit, general and systematic model of therapeutic philosophy a relatively broad and well-structured account provided by Martha Nussbaum is subjected to analysis. The results obtained, subsequently, form a basis for a new model constructed around (...) the set of notions intrinsically connected with any, philosophical, psychological, or medical, form of therapy. The conceptual framework of: disease and its symptoms, the health ideal, the process of treatment with its techniques, therapeutic theory, physician, patient, and the physician-patient relationship is constructed and investigated in the context of its possible metaphilosophical use. An illustrative application of this scheme to philosophical therapy developed by Stoicism is, then, discussed. Finally, the issue of the therapeutic metaphilosophy's scope as well as the problem of therapeutic philosophy's specificity and integrity are briefly indicated. (shrink)

The tattered remains of a few paragraphs of a work on harmonic theory were published in 1986 as P. Oxy. LIII.3706, with a careful commentary by M. W. Haslam. There are six fragments. Four of them are too small for any substantial sense to be recovered; and while fr. 2 and the second column of fr. 1 allow us to pick out significant words and phrases here and there, the remnants of these columns are very narrow, and the line of (...) reasoning seems inaccessible. Musicological analysis must focus on the first column of fr. 1. There is little enough even of that, and in attempting a relatively detailed interpretation I shall have to be rather less cautious than Haslam quite properly was. But I think that something can be made of it without stretching speculation too far, and if I am right the piece is of some genuine interest. Here are the two versions of the text that Haslam prints. The first records what is decipherable on the papyrus itself, while the second represents a partial reconstruction, restoring word-divisions and some of the missing letters. (shrink)

English title: Change for praktike. Minor Comments to Evagrius Ponticus’ Philosophy of Life. The paper elucidates the evolution in understanding of a life phenomenon, which took place in the writing of the early Christian authors who referred to the heritage of the ancient philosophy trying to define their own position in relation to it. In this perspective the present author discusses the thought of Evagius Ponticus who undertakes some currents typical of Socrates’ concept of life, known from Plato’s dialogues. As (...) Bogaczyk argues, among the common points for both philosophical traditions, the ancient Greek and early Christian, there are, first of all, the understanding of life as change and as the exercise in accepting this change and mortality it inevitably implies. That is only the dialectics of life and death, or hope and pessimism, which makes the phenomenon of life accessible to us, and its concept possible to be grasped. Thus, this dialectics can be applied either in contemporary currents of philosophy of life or in psychological and medical approach towards the problem of depression. (shrink)

In a nutshell: this volume lives up to the impressive standards of the OSAP series. Throughout the eleven articles and two reviews, the clarity and rigor of argument are of a very high quality. Given the intensity and complexity of the articles, the primary audience will be graduate students and professors. In this issue "ancient philosophy" means Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The first four articles are on Socrates and Plato; the last seven discuss various topics in Aristotelian studies. This is (...) a shame, but it takes nothing away from the value of these articles themselves. Since OSAP is a journal, I won't try to tie the contents together. Instead, I will briefly summarize the articles.1.. (shrink)

Socrates' greatest philosophical contribution was to have initiated the search for definitions. In Definition in Greek Philosophy his views on definition are examined, together with those of his successors, including Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Galen, the Sceptics and Plotinus. Although definition was a major pre-occupation for many Greek philosophers, it has rarely been treated as a separate topic in its own right in recent years. This volume, which contains fourteen new essays by leading scholars, aims to reawaken interest in a (...) number of central and relatively unexplored issues concerning definition. These issues are briefly set out in the Introduction, which also seeks to point out scholarly and philosophical questions which merit further study. (shrink)

This book has two basic aims: to provide a clear and comprehensive account of the most prominent moral philosophies of ancient Greece and Rome, and to explain how for their adherents, these philosophies both motivated and constituted distinctive ways of life. Cooper succeeds admirably in achieving the first aim: he gives clear and concise accounts of the moral philosophies of Socrates, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Pyrrhonists, and the Platonists. Each chapter explores not only the basic theories of the (...) school in question, but also some lingering questions readers may have about those theories’ implications. Cooper aims for his book to be both accessible to readers with little formal .. (shrink)

This book contains a collection of 13 essays from leading scholars on the relationship between passionate emotions and moral advancement in Greek and Roman thought. Recognising that emotions played a key role in whether individuals lived happily, ancient philosophers extensively discussed the nature of the passions.

This book, a collection of specially written essays by leading international scholars, reexamines ancient ideas of reason and rationality. The application of changing notions of rationality down the ages has led to consistent misinterpretation of standard ancient philosophical texts: the distinguished contributors here redress the balance, clarifying how the great thinkers of antiquity themselves conceived of rationality.

This book discusses key philosophical concepts and ideologies, including ontology, epistemology, logic, semantics, moral and political philosophy, theology and aesthetics during classical antiquity. Karsten Friis Johansen charts the history of ancient philosophy from the mythological oral tradition, Homer and early tragedy, to the giants of Plato and Aristotle through to paganism and the genesis of Christianity. A History of Ancient Philosophy also presents detailed analysis of individual ancient philosophers and interpretations and commentary on key philosophical passages.

A Companion to Ancient Philosophy provides a comprehensive and current overview of the history of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy from its origins until late antiquity. Comprises an extensive collection of original essays, featuring contributions from both rising stars and senior scholars of ancient philosophy Integrates analytic and continental traditions Explores the development of various disciplines, such as mathematics, logic, grammar, physics, and medicine, in relation to ancient philosophy Includes an illuminating introduction, bibliography, chronology, maps and an index.

Historically embryogenesis has been among the most philosophically intriguing phenomena. In this paper I focus on one aspect of biological development that was particularly perplexing to the ancients: self-organisation. For many ancients, the fact that an organism determines the important features of its own development required a special model for understanding how this was possible. This was especially true for Aristotle, Alexander, and Simplicius who all looked to contemporary technology to supply that model. However, they did not all agree on (...) what kind of device should be used. In this paper I explore the way these ancients made use of technology as a model for the developing embryo. However, my purpose here is more than just the historical interest of knowing which devices were used by whom and how each of them worked; I shall largely ignore the details of how the various devices actually worked. Instead I shall look at the use of technology from a philosophical perspective. As we shall see, the different choices of device reveal fundamental differences in the way each thinker understood the nature of biological development itself. Thus, the central aim of this paper is to examine, not who used what devices and how they worked, but why they used those particular devices and what they thought their functioning could tell us about the nature of embryological phenomena. (shrink)

Mental health in Plato's Republic.--The practical syllogism and incontinence.--Aristotle on happiness.--Intellect and imagination in Aquinas.--Descartes on the will.--Cartesian privacy.--Appendix: The history of intention in ethics.--Bibliography (p. [147]).

Explores how the fragments of Heraclitus might yield an implicit understanding of the human body in distinction to the soul. In the history of scholarship on Heraclitus, soul is a much better understood concept, whereas it is normally assumed that Heraclitus, along with other figures of early Greek thought, shows only the most limited comprehension of the human being in terms of bodily form or substance. In this work I sketch some different ways in which Heraclitus’ accounts of nature and (...) human life can be said to exhibit a rudimentary picture of body. I suggest that Heraclitus depicts the human body as a special form of soul’s self-differentiation and logos. I attempt to consider how Heraclitus may represent an historical moment in understanding the human in terms of its physical makeup. (shrink)

Plato began it. After thinking about the nature of argument he concluded that the correct way of reasoning was the axiomatic way, and formulated the programme of axiomatization that Eudoxus and Euclid subsequently carried out. Since then the axiomatic method has been firmly established, not only as the method for mathematics, but as a paradigm to which all other disciplines should strive to be assimilated; and in this present century not only has axiomatization been carried through as completely as it (...) can be, but the most determined efforts have been made to wish hypotheticodeductive schemata on to biology, economics, and even history. (shrink)

The author investigates greek ontologies that apparently rely on a conflation of "binary" (x is f) and "monadic" (x is) uses of 'is'. He uses Aristotelian and other texts to support his proposal that these ontologies are explained by the Greeks using two alternative semantic analyses for 'x is F'. The first views it as asserting a relation between x and F, the second as asserting that a "predicative complex" exists, where a predicative complex is a complex consisting of x (...) and F. The article concludes by indicating some uses for the novel concept of predicative complex in aristotelian interpretation. (shrink)

If Socrates is portrayed holding one view in one of Plato's dialogues and a different view in another, should we be puzzled? If (as I suggest) Plato's Socrates is neither the historical Socrates, nor a device for delivering Platonic doctrine, but a tool for the dialectical investigation of a philosophical problem, then we should expect a new Socrates, with relevant commitments, to be devised for each setting. Such a dialectical device – the tailor-made Socrates – fits with what we know (...) of other contributions to the genre of the Sokratikos Logos, to which Plato was neither the first nor the only contributor. (shrink)

The second chapter of book three of the De anima marks the end of Aristotle's discussion of sense-perception. The chapter is a long one and apparently rambling in subject matter. It begins with a passage that is usually taken as a discussion of some sort of self-awareness, particularly awareness that one is perceiving, although such an interpretation raises some difficulties. This paper reconsiders the problems raised by supposing that the question discussed in the first paragraph is ‘how do we perceive (...) that we perceive?’, and suggests an alternative interpretation which would solve many of the difficulties and have the additional merit of restoring unity to the sequence of notes which go to make up the whole chapter. (shrink)